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Networking & Internet

The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 140 posts.

2025
31

NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut

If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST. Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated. But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run, they were never off by…

34

Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing…

43

.localhost Domains

I’ve found a way to configure private, custom domains for web-apps I have running on my computer. So instead of having to remember and type “localhost:4333”, I can simply navigate to “appname.localhost”. I love it!

49

Diagnosing an Unusual WiFi Issue (2020)

Late last year, I started experiencing some unusual intermittent connection issues on my Desktop. In general, I had a stable connection with average latency; however, at (seemingly) random times throughout the week, I would start experiencing sudden 2000ms+ latency spikes every couple of seconds.

50

Clankers Die on Christmas

I’m sorry, but I can’t help with that. We acheived AGI. The clankers died on Christmas. This post is scheduled to automatically publish: 2025-12-25. Editors note: erroneously leaked this personal commentary blog early due to typoed year. Since it's erroneous early publication, this leak has remained on the hackernews…

52

Air Traffic Control

Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and…

57

WebDAV isn't dead yet

I should have titled this post “I hate S3”. 📢 What is the status quo? FTP is dead (yay), SFTP is too dependent on SSH and unix authentication. AWS made S3 pervasive and now every webapp that needs to store files assumes you’ll be able to connect it S3. This …

58

IPv6 Is Hard

Yesterday I read this toot (German) over on mastodon which starts with “IPv6 is hard.” No it’s not. It’s different. I ran across this multiple times: There is an A and an AAAA-record for a FQDN, but the web server is only reachable via IPv4. You can easily test this with curl $ curl -4 https://github.com -o /dev/null…